So a while back i was talking to Charlie hurtlocker about this card, and i was wanting to get a gauge on how many actually exist in the wild.
I know there are a handful of graded copies in the world, but I’m looking for a show of hands who has one?
My conservative estimate is 500 cards
Ps, i do have one. And i know of 1 raw and one psa8 in Australia
How did you get to 500?
Charlie “Welcome to the Hurtlocker” Hurlocker 
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Was the estimate Charlie gave me
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The person that got that 6 got a steal also
I cracked a PSA 8 for my binder copy. I have only seen a couple the past handful of years.
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I tried my best to get an estimate myself. First things first, damn are the European Regionals from that time not well documented. Anyway, I was able to confirm the existence of at least 15 Regionals from that time frame in Germany, Austria, The Netherlands and Belgium as there is at least some documentation on those.
Germany / Austria
Late 2012: At least 8 Events
Early 2013: At least 2 events
Netherlands / Belgium
Late 2012: At least 3 events
Early 2013: At least two events
For other countries I was not able to find any proper documentation. However at least for the UK, I was able to confirm that Regionals existed at all and this link from above also confirms it for France.
According to Liquipedia the player count at the European Regionals in the Masters Divison ranged from 18 to 63 with most tournaments having 30-50 players. Those are of course very small numbers compared to today even when adding in the other age divisions which usually together had a little lower amount of players than the Masters Divison. But even for the usually 50-100 players you’d get that way, you’d need at least some staff. I would guess that at least 5-10 staff members would have been present at any given Regional (although if someone has first hand experience from tournaments back then feel free to correct me on that number).
So with at the very least 17 Regionals and 5 staff members per tournament, the absolute lowest guess for the number of copies out there I’d make is 85. However just because they aren’t documented well doesn’t mean that the rest of Europe didn’t have Regionals, so I’d say it is reasonable to assume that the rest of Europe combined (mainly the UK and France of course) probably had a similar number of tournaments to Germany, Austria, The Netherlands and Belgium. If we also consider that 5 staff members may be a bit of a low guess and go with closer to 10, we arrive at around 300 copies in existence.
So overall, this card almost certainly does not have below 85 copies in existence with around 250-300 copies probably being a reasonable assumption for the number of copies and there are likely less than 1,000 copies out there.
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That’s amazing.
Thank you so much for your analogy
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I own a copy. They are very difficult to find in the U.S., as many (most?) are still in Europe.
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I can at least confirm the UK had one on March 16th that provided the staff cards (I was one of the staff that received one). And that there were 67 players total. There was another in Crawley with 64 people.
Are you sure the late 2012 events gave the same promo card? I thought they were under a different run of tournaments as they used to have Regional periods at different times of the year. So a “Spring Series” of Regionals and a “Winter Series” for example. I attended one in Aldershot in November earlier in the season and got a different promo card I’m pretty sure. (Possibly Jolteon?)
You can find exact numbers for more events from this era by asking people who would have played in events in this time period as it’s still saved on their play Pokemon page.
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I was going by the Bulbapedia description:
And thus assumed that the card was available during the whole 2012-2013 season. If that turns out to be not true, one could probably about cut the estimates in half.
The Spring Regionals it mentions only applied to the events around that March timeframe that season. If you go to the Jolteon page it’ll say the same line of text but for “Autumn Regionals” and for Flareon it’ll say for “Winter Regionals”
So I’m pretty sure only events you find in that March timeframe will have the possibility to give out Staff Vaporeon cards. Going off previous years data and asking friends who played during that time I’d estimate there were ~5 regionals in the UK in that timeframe. (Since they tried not to do events on the same dates).
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